The wind of the past week is unabated; a pink plastic bucket has just bowled past the window and two cockerels have hopped onto the sill for shelter and are staring in at me. Their wives huddle in the flowerbed below, having scratched out a couple of really nice little hen-sized hollows with scant regard for my plants and bulbs. Hens spell death to a garden, and my bantams were carefully selected for their prettiness and also for their small talons. They are all called Mustard, Custard and Flustered for ease of identification. They make a big effort to keep things trim with beak and claw in the borders, and have clipped back the wallflowers to stumps, so I don’t think they will manage to flower this year. It doesn’t matter; the wallflower display was pretty paltry anyway. I am planning something more splendid for next year, and have ordered six packets of wine-dark Cheiranthus Ruby Gem accordingly.
I used to buy ready-grown wallflower plants in late autumn from an old man who sold them from a trestle-table on the roadside in front of his cottage. He always wore a collar and tie for gardening, and even in high summer he kept his jacket buttoned up and belted with binder twine for double security. Last year he gave me three ornamental cabbages to go with the wallflowers, and we were on excellent terms. His garden was a delight all year round, and he was like a benign Mr McGregor in it. He painted his terracotta flowerpots pale blue and had a compost heap as brown and square as an Oxo cube.
But when I drove by after Christmas there was a ‘For sale’ sign on his cottage. It went a few weeks later, and now the shaggy hedge has been clipped, the rose bushes shorn and a smart red estate car is parked where once there was a stamp-sized lawn. A silver climbing frame gleams on the vegetable patch, and the cottage has been repointed and tidied like any other. All traces of the old man have been hurled into a skip and driven away to a dump. I hope he died quietly in his sleep, or keeled over into oblivion in the garden during a double-digging session. It is unbearable to think of him now in some grim old folks’ home in Cromer, tethered to a chair and staring into the sea.
March 5th
The Hallidays, wonderful glamorous Rose, godmother to The Beauty, and her husband, Tristan, are coming to stay and I want everything to be perfect. In preparation I sally into the garden in the manner of Vita S-W to pluck some appropriate offerings for their bedroom. The air is dry and bitter, the friendly barn owl swoops past, his feathers ivory and cream against a white sky. He flits over the hedge and continues to search for afternoon tea in the water-meadows, flying low and following the contours of the ground like a miniature warhead. The garden is a disgrace. Everything small and delicate in front of the house is mud-splattered, and otherwise there are only daffodils, but none of the wild, ragged double ones, just those that remind me of children’s plastic windmills in their chrome-yellow neatness of trumpet and petal. I toss one or two of these into my basket and march on, sighing and squelching in new ankle-length red wellingtons. Felix ambushes me to discuss his pocket money.
‘I need to buy some Warhammers on Saturday, how much money will I have when you give me all the pocket money you owe me? I’ve got seventeen so far.’
‘Seventeen what?’ I am wondering whether the red wellingtons were a mistake, but have no concrete evidence against them. Felix digs into his pocket and shows me a few pennies.
‘Seventeen of these,’ he says. Not enough for so much as a Warhammer arm. Weakly, wrongly, considering that I have just rejected them for lack of beauty, I agree to pay him fifty pence if he picks a vast quantity of daffodils. He hurtles off to oblige, and I am tempted to give up my search for a decent bunch for the Hallidays’ bedroom. A few anemones are gasping and lying flat on the ground in the manner of fish out of water, but mainly the garden is twiggy in anticipation of buds. I drag a lot of sticks into the house and plonk them in vases. They almost look Japanese. Felix’s daffodils do not.
March 7th
The Hallidays arrive bearing armfuls of exotica. A black hellebore, a jar of lobster bisque, confit de canard, organic sun-ripened-on-the-vine tomatoes and the books that the children have been longing for but which I have been too mean to buy. We are all wildly overexcited at seeing one another and I realise just how feeble my twig displays are when Rose produces a peerless posy of gold-lace polyanthus. Immediately consume half a walnut cake and three pots of tea with Rose. Due to my excitement at seeing her, my brain cannot register the fact that she does not want milk in her tea. The table becomes covered with unwanted cups of pale tea as I solicitously pour yet more milk for Rose. Meanwhile, Master Halliday, who is one and a half, is conducting a top-secret excavation in the food cupboard. He emerges, beaming, at his mother’s side and she and I scream. He is smothered in blood. Mercifully we see the bottle in his hands.
‘Oh, God, it’s cochineal,’ says Rose, then she blanches. ‘Look at the floor.’
The beautiful, warm, expensive, sweet-chestnut floor is splashed with crimson. He seems to have toured every corner and we have not noticed. I laugh like an idiot; Rose leaps into action, dons rubber gloves, finds a scrubbing brush and some detergent and becomes immersed in pink foam. The next half-hour is a scene from a Carry On horror film. Rose and I scrub, wipe, sigh with relief and sit down, only to jump up shrieking again as more bloody blobs appear. Cochineal is on our shoes, under our nails, over the table and most of all on Master Halliday, now known as Vampire Baby. Rose is far more concerned about the floor, but I want to see if we can turn him back into the perfect specimen he was, or if he is going to stay gruesomely pink for ever. An hour later he is slumbering sweetly, and, thank God, not pinkly, and Rose and I collapse onto the drawing-room sofa as wrung out as a couple of old dishcloths. We are now supposed to sparkle, pre-dinner, and be vivacious. A drink is called for. And another.
The evenings are slowly becoming lighter, but the air still breathes a chill through the yard when I go out to lock up the hens. The wind is high tonight, pulling at branches and wrapping around the roof, but it is mild, and, on ground level, quite still, so I decide to take the rotund terrier Rags down the lane a few yards to stretch her legs before bed. Moonlight illuminates the way, then is eclipsed by gusting cloud. I kick at an old black bag, a darker shadow in a dark corner by the hedge, and scream as it rises and lurches past me. Rags comes to the rescue with a flourish, yapping and growling at the swaying, ink-dark form. Cloud blows off the moon, and in the half-light I make out the bony shape of a calf’s back humping away down towards the road. Two others hurtle past me to join their leader. Heart still racing, I return home to telephone the farmer. Should really herd them in myself, as I know where they belong, but it is nine-thirty, and I will miss vital classic serial on the radio if I do. It is War and Peace, in twenty parts. Blissful and agonising, and essential as bathtime entertainment for me, being a million miles from childcare and domestic toil.
The Women’s Institute market supplies instant satisfaction in the form of trays of gaudy primulas for me to dot around the house and plant in the garden. Much needed, as we have reached the most squalid phase of the year now, when weeds are revving up to choke the borders and no plants have yet emerged from beneath the ground. The house is just as bad, filth exposed by the harsh glare of March sunshine. Fingerprints like a tide along every door, and most furniture creaking and shedding infinitesimal quantities of sawdust every day, like a tree’s deciduum at dusk. Only notice this when hoovering, as one sweep beneath a chair leaves a very obvious path between kerbs of dust. Must don a mob cap and do some work avoidance. Spurred on to housework by the arrival of three different brochures in need of copy. My job is to write it. This week I must sift sense from pages of computer-speak to make an interesting and readable booklet for Belhaven Conference Halls, for Tremendous, a new outsized clothing catalogue, and for Heavenly Petting’s new mail-order funeral service. Can hardly contain my excitement and yearn to get down to it. But first, the cupboard under the sink has become a hotel for slugs and snails. It needs my attention.
The Beauty and I are in west London preparing for a meeting with an intimidating and groovy magazine editor. As I try to wipe traces of The Beauty’s breakfast off my only decent shirt, I rack my brains for things I can say I want to write about. A human biology poster on my host’s bathroom wall offers inspiration, and I plan an article: ‘We are all obsessed with the value of our houses, but do we realise how much our internal organs are worth?’ It could be illustrated with a picture of Kate Moss with arrows and prices pointing to different valuable bits of her insides. Downstairs, the house we are staying in, which belongs to my friend Lila, is enveloped in incense and weird fluting and groaning noises are issuing from the CD player, creating an ambient atmosphere for her private yoga class. I tiptoe down and out with The Beauty, and catch a glimpse of Alaric, the hirsute Californian teacher, hitching up his Y-fronts so the waistband shows above that of his trousers as he prepares himself for a new position.
The Beauty enjoys the magazine meeting very much, and destroys three copies of the latest issue while grinding her teeth and cackling. The editor disarms me by being friendly and approachable where I expected hauteur and disdain, and by being dressed in a delicious skippy skirt which I covet. I am delighted with the whole occasion and sweep out feeling it has all gone superbly, until I catch sight of myself in a mirror as I pass a beauty salon. My cheeks are puce, as if I have been drinking port since crack of dawn, or have reached the hot flush stage of life.
Can’t help contrasting my appearance with The Beauty’s majestic loveliness today. She is stuffed, for the last time, because it really is too small, into an emerald-green Indian dress with mirrored and embroidered bodice. Setting off the outfit is a small mauve horse she has pinched from Lila’s spoilt daughter Calypso. She has not let go of this horse since breakfast, believing that possession is nine-tenths of the law, and this is now her horse. I am on her side. I shouldn’t think Calypso will notice, but if she did, she would not dream of giving one of her sackloads of toys to The Beauty or anyone else.
On the way home we strike a blow for helpless femininity in the multi-storey car park. No amount of jerking forwards and backwards on my part can extract my car from its space. The iceberg-dark walls begin to close in and panic also, and I imagine spending the night in this morgue with only a few rice cakes as sustenance. Salvation appears, in a dark suit with a mobile phone and briefcase. He has just parked his own sleek car without any trouble. I rush to accost him before he vanishes onto the street.
‘I can’t get my car out of this car park. Please can you do it?’ I beg, and he beams happily, as men do when faced with female frailty, and obliges. I am profoundly relieved that he is not a New Man, and head for Norfolk in a cheerful and grateful frame of mind.
March 20th
Nits have staged a comeback. A posse is installed on Giles’s head, smaller ones grouped behind the ears, grading up to the crown of his head where the field-marshal nits, creatures on the scale of an insect Arnold Schwarzenegger, have settled. Felix has them too, and as usual I start scratching as soon as I spy theirs.
I am an old hand at nit work, and am expert on different methods. The doctor used to give us highly toxic lotion which a) didn’t work, and b) has since been condemned as brain-damaging. We keep away from orthodox cures now and have adopted a series of treatments through discussion with other infestees. Tea tree shampoo and conditioner is the current success story, combined with vigorous use of a nit comb, although here opinion is divided. My mother, despite insisting that my brother Desmond and I have never had nits, swears by the plastic comb, while Lila snorts in disbelief at the idea and waves her metal-toothed one as if it is a magic wand. We use both, and it is gratifying in the same awful way that picking spots is gratifying, to see the nits lying helpless on the comb and then to guillotine them with a sharp fingernail.
I forget to de-nit myself and remember on the way to the hairdresser. Arrive there in a welter of embarrassment at what they may find. Mercifully Emily, my usual coiffeuse, is in a trance of gloom and stares at the ceiling without speaking once during her twenty-minute assault on my hair. This technique does not make me looked groomed and expensive, but at least it saves me the hideous humiliation of being outed as a nit carrier.
March 29th
Easter Sunday, and we have lunch with my mother. Roast lamb, mint sauce, apple crumble. This has been Easter lunch ever since I can remember, and is the high point of my mother’s culinary calendar. We find her painting her fingernails alternate red and blue stripes.
‘It won’t be ready for a bit,’ she says, ‘probably an hour. Go and see what you can find in the garden.’
She has a large carrier bag behind her back, and as we follow the children outside, she surreptitiously reaches into it, replenishing stocks of miniature coloured eggs on garden seats and steps. ‘Come back, you’ve missed some,’ she calls to Giles, now vanishing into undergrowth at the bottom of the garden. Then she turns to me.
‘I’ve hidden a few miniatures and a couple of packets of Silk Cut as well. Just to make it fun for us geriatrics and The Gnome. Come on, let’s go and find them, it’s time for a pre-lunch drink.’
The Gnome, my mother’s lodger, emerges from his caravan, called from his star maps and astrological calculations by whoops of triumph from outside. He is particularly Hobbit-esque today, with ink smudges on his face and a short brown suede jacket with brass buttons and a belt. All he lacks is a pointy hat. Felix crawls out from under the caravan step and charges towards the Gnome’s front door.
‘Oh, no, dear child.’ The Gnome is so softly spoken that his voice has been recorded and used to signify conscience and also dew, on local radio productions. I can never believe that anyone can hear him, but somehow they do. The Gnome smiles, bestowing watery good tidings on the boys.
‘Don’t go in there, it’s just a mess. Here, the Easter Rabbit asked me to pass these on.’
He holds out two toffee apples with long brown felt ears. Felix and Giles thank him and vanish behind the caravan. My mother beckons to him.
‘Come in for a drink, or rather out. I’ve put a table down by the stream.’
The Gnome looks pleased, and follows us down a winding path to the tiny fairy stream, where my mother has arranged three small chairs and a table. Water chatters over blue and brown pebbles in the one-foot-wide ripple of river as it makes its way through the garden. A pink jug and bowl lie on the bank, and a small pair of pink wellington boots. My mother sinks into one of the chairs and lights a cigarette.
‘It’s really for The Beauty, but we may as well sit here for a minute with her and see how many of those miniatures we can spot. They’ve got ready-made Bloody Marys in them.’
The Beauty, like an empress, sits by the water’s edge, chewing chocolate and wiggling her boot-clad feet. We, her subjects, drink Bloody Marys straight from little cold bottles, and absorb spring birdsong in the pale sunshine.
April 1st
Suspicions should have been aroused by the arrival of Giles and Felix by my bedside.
‘Hello, Mummy, we’ve made you some tea.’
Dear little tousled children with pyjamas on. Kiss them as I struggle into wakefulness, and do not even mind that it is six-thirty and still dark, thanks to British Summer Time, because I am touched by their kindness. Nestle against pillows with darling sons on either side. Both very smiley. Sweet. Sip daintily at my tea.
‘Euugh! Who on earth taught you to make tea? This has got salt in it, you twits.’
‘Ha, ha, April Fool.’ They dance around my bedroom squealing and laughing. ‘Tricked you, tricked you. We wanted to make an apple-pie bed, but there weren’t any apples.’
Become helpless laughing myself, and with their Exocet instincts for a weak moment they wring a promise of apple-pie-bed instruction from me.
‘Then we can do it to Daddy, next time we go to stay.’ An excellent notion.
April 8th
Vivienne and Simon, local farmers and stalwart friends, arrive for tea with three pigeons, a pair of ducks and a mother hen with chicks.
‘Happy Easter,’ beams Simon, kissing my cheeks on the threshold, leaning in through the back door and swinging a pigeon from each hand.
Giles has been up a tree overseeing the nest-building activities of various small birds. He slithers down, having spotted the pigeons, and helps Simon mend the holes in the wire netting of the henhouse.
‘They can all live together in there,’ pronounces Simon, ‘but we’ll have to get rid of some of those young cocks. You’ve got more than you have hens, you know.’
‘Venetia, don’t let him bully you. He loves killing things, and will find any excuse,’ Vivienne intervenes, as Simon marches towards the henhouse with a broom in his hands.
‘I’ll leave it until dusk, then they’ll be in the house. It’s easier when they’re asleep.’
I am unkeen on this cold-blooded murder. ‘Can’t I just give them away?’ I plead.
‘Don’t be feeble,’ says Simon briskly. ‘No one wants cockerels except to eat, so you may as well eat them yourself.’
Fortunately, the execution is forgotten in a sudden flurry of activity. A car’s wheel bowls into the yard, hotly pursued by my mother’s car.
‘Does she not know where the spare tyre lives?’ jokes Simon. It transpires that the wheel has fallen off the car.
‘It happened just by your gate. Thank God. I could have been on the superhighway.’ My mother clambers out of her seat and stands in the yard, huddled around a comforting cigarette.
‘She means the main road,’ Felix whispers to Vivienne.
My mother continues, ‘It just kept rolling, and I thought it was better to stay with the wheel than to stop. Odd that the car didn’t tip up. I was rather impressed by it. I suppose they balance them in case of this sort of thing.’
‘I don’t think car manufacturers expect the wheels to fall off their vehicles,’ says Simon drily, his voice wafting from beneath the car, where he is examining the axle.
April 17th
The financial struggle is exacerbated by the non-arrival of Charles’s usual cheque. When I telephone him, he says that he forgot to post it this week because he and Helena were skiing. However, he will send it now. Then he coughs and says, ‘And maybe to help finances, you might have Helena’s aunt to stay tomorrow night. She’s bringing her bloodhounds to Norfolk for some filming. The film company will pay you.’
Even though they are related to Helena, I cannot resist the idea of film-star bloodhounds and agree to have them. When I put the telephone down I am irritated to realise that I accidentally let the skiing holiday through without comment.
The bloodhounds arrive with Val, aunt of the poison dwarf Helena. They leap, with sinewy grace, from a brand-new Range Rover, at precisely the moment that Rags returns from her excavation of the rubbish bags at the bottom of the drive. She launches herself at the nearest one, her absurd, clockwork yaps ricocheting off the door panel. The bloodhounds retreat in horror, but the larger one is too slow: Rags leaps and embeds her teeth in its voluminous and probably very valuable lower lip. It yowls and runs to its car for comfort with Rags dangling from the mighty jaw. Luckily Val thinks it’s funny, otherwise we could be facing a vast bill for trauma and surgery to the film star.
Felix and Giles throw sticks for the bloodhounds and Rags dashes to and fro yapping, determined not to be left out. Val comes to life wondrously at the offer of a gin and tonic and I pump her for Hello!-style information about the famous people she has met. She can only remember films by the animals and doesn’t know who anyone is.
‘Oh, yes, they used Jane Bentley’s horses for Sense and Sensibility, and three of my pugs. Chris Dowell was the lucky one on that – two hundred white doves she took down there and they never got them out of their cages. She got paid two grand just for being there.’
‘But did you meet Alan Rickman?’
‘Who? Oh, you mean the bloke with the black-saddle horse. No… he didn’t look much once he got off the horse. I’d be hard put recognising him, to be honest.’
There is evidently no point in pursuing this line with her, so I try a different tack.
‘Could Rags do film work?’ Val laughs more than I feel is necessary at this, and I am hugely relieved when she asks if there is a local pub she can eat in. I offer to babysit for the bloodhounds and am accepted. Wonder if I can charge extra for this service.
April 21st
Garden work is badly needed right now, or the whole thing will bolt and be gone for the summer. I do wish I had not sown so many seeds. The conservatory is littered with trays: they are in the cold frame and perched in the back kitchen where Sidney, the cat, instead of using them as a litter tray as one might expect, sleeps in them, crushing the struggling seedlings straight back into the dirt from whence they came. I must plant them to save them from suffocation by cat.
I array myself in an anorak caked with plaster and dog hair and an orange bobble hat and step gingerly out into the elements. I do not look fetching and have picked a bad day for gardening; dirty grey clouds spit rain in flurries and the bullish wind pushes me around. I would give up, but my mother has taken The Beauty for the day, and I must seize this opportunity to have uninterrupted access to soil, compost, rose thorns and other items unacceptable to a baby. I am sidetracked, as I wheel numerous seed trays towards the borders, by my short red wellingtons. They are on my feet, but I keep glimpsing them out of the corner of my eye, and they make me uneasy. I am pretty sure that they look absurd, and even foul. Still, no one can see me, so it doesn’t matter and I won’t wear them again. I plant a row of black pansies and the sun rushes out from behind a cloud, the wind drops and a waft of spring warmth envelops me. Spreading my arms wide, I throw myself on the grass and gaze up at the infinite blue.
‘Mrs Denny?’
I must have closed my eyes and gone to sleep. Opening them now, there is a face where there had been sky. Slate-grey eyes laugh, but a polite and serious voice says, ‘I’m looking for Mrs Denny.’
‘Oh yes, that’s me.’ I must get up, but how? He is still looking at me from beneath dark, arched brows.
‘I’m David Lanyon,’ he continues. ‘You rang me last week about some work on your bathroom.’
I don’t in fact hear him say much of this; I am wrestling with rosy embarrassment and trying to get up without showing my pink face. Am convinced that my mouth was open when I was asleep, and I may have been snoring. Glimpse a wide grin, and buy time for myself by pretending to pull a thistle from the grass.
‘Yes, yes. It’s in the house. Do go and have a look at it.’ He doesn’t go. Instead he holds out a hand to help me up as though I am a thousand years old.
‘Will you show me where it is?’ I probably seem antique to him. He is about my age but not careworn and wrinkled by responsibility. Can’t help staring at his unlined countenance, his straight nose and then at his trainers which have silver ribs and are very unrustic. Suddenly realise that once again he has been speaking and I have missed it.
‘… Could be the best way to approach it for now, if you agree.’
‘Oh yes, I agree absolutely,’ I start to gabble. ‘I’m so glad we agree about that, and everything.’
He looks surprised. ‘But I haven’t shown you the prototype yet.’
‘No, but I’m sure it will be lovely.’
Thankfully we have now reached the bathroom, pausing on the way for me to shed boots and awful exterior layers in the hall. Underneath not much better. Why didn’t I notice that my shirt is missing most buttons when I dressed this morning? How can my standards be so low? Must reform and refine my wardrobe immediately.
I show him into the bathroom with a flourish of my arm and just stop myself making a trumpet-call sound. It transpires that he wants to build a majestic bathroom with cupboards and so forth, completely free, if I will allow him to have it photographed for publicity and for his brochure. My only cost will be paint when it is finished. This is fantastic. I agree, and wildly say I don’t even need to approve the sketches. He shakes my hand fervently and capers about saying what perfect proportions the bathroom has. After he has gone I begin to regret having relinquished any control, but cannot think of a way to unsay it without seeming rude and untrusting.
April 23rd
Lie about groaning for most of the morning due to hangover. This was caused by an evening alone with a bottle of wine and a mirror. Not a good combination. At eleven p.m. Kris Kristofferson and I were alone together and he was reminding me that:
Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose, And nothing ain’t worth nothing if it’s free.
Copious weeping on my part as I faced the terrible drunken truth: I am doomed never to be attractive to anyone and will never find a fling, let alone a boyfriend, again. I am old and mouldy now and have missed my chances. At midnight I was juggling the household accounts and failing to find funds with which to go to health farm and/or buy cashmere cardigans. At twelve-fifteen I noticed that the wine was finished and the fire was out, and took myself to bed to sleep off self-pity.
The children have ice cream and Rice Krispies for breakfast because I am enfeebled and there is no milk. Not my day for the school run, so thrust them into another mother’s car with scarcely a kiss and retreat to the security of the Aga rail. Dump The Beauty back in her cot as soon as decently possible after breakfast, where she wails loudly and causes my head to whirl and bounce horribly. The hangover retreats but not the cause of it, as I can see only too clearly in the bathroom mirror when I finally decide to brush my teeth. Distracted from detailed survey of my skin’s dry rot and subsidence by the doorbell. It is the postman, with a fat pile of letters, probably all bills. He could easily have put them through the letter box, but has chosen to summon me and is now smiling fondly, as if at his favourite football team, at my droopy nightie and crimson toenails.
‘You’re late,’ I snarl.
A mistake, giving him the opportunity to reply, ‘But you aren’t up anyway, are you?’ He winks, then turns back to his van and drives off whistling and revving the engine. This is all very trying and sends me huffing and muttering back to my room. I am not at all cheered by the postman’s interest in me. I do not wish to have a Jack Nicholson/Jessica Lange empathy with him. I nestle back against the pillows for further wallowing and watch Teletubbies. An excellent programme. The Tubbies are all skipping about singing, ‘Telescope, telescope’.
They give me the boost I need. I telephone Mo Loam’s Temple to Beauty in London and book myself an appointment. The earliest available one is in six months’ time, and an hour with the high priestess slapping unguents onto my face will cost £120. I put the telephone down with that shaky, nauseous guilt feeling that comes with wanton extravagance. Feel sick for a while before realising that it will cost the same as half an hour with my lawyer. Plainly a bargain.
April 26th
Spring pours in through every window on a tide of blossom-scented air. One of the hens, Custard, or perhaps Flustered, has hatched three chicks and they bowl about after her, tiny blobs of apricot cotton wool beneath the apple blossom. The Beauty is very taken with them, and makes her way towards the orchard any time she is not under close surveillance. Her new shuffle, on her bottom with rowing action from her legs, is speedy, and I am constantly having to leave the telephone dangling from its rubber spiral, or damp laundry spewing from the washing machine, to follow her as she scoops herself down the drive with Rags. Giles offers to look after her this morning, but becomes engrossed in Billy Whizz; The Beauty eats three geranium heads and is sick.
‘She’s been sick, Mum.’ Giles wanders off, reminding me unpleasantly of his father. The Beauty takes advantage and vanishes. This time I discover her with Felix. He is attempting to climb a small flowering tree with her, but has not yet got far up it. He is doing well. The Beauty is wedged into a fork in the branches and squeals and claps with delight as Felix climbs up past her then reaches down to lift her onto her next perch. There she rests, a vision of rustic charm, in her green jersey with ladybirds on it, waving a fat hand at me from behind a spray of apple blossom.
Mustard the cockerel is in attendance. He is a control freak and polices the garden daily to make sure that all is as it should be. He likes to find The Beauty in her pram under a tree, and hops onto the handle to cast a beady eye over her as she sleeps. Sometimes he cannot resist spoiling everything, and crows mightily from this vantage point, startling The Beauty awake and causing her to yell. This morning he is not pleased to find her flitting about in treetops, and perches himself at a cautious distance on the swing to watch while emitting a ghastly slow groaning noise.
April 27th
What was to have been a lazy Monday morning due to the boys having the day off, is shattered by the shrilling of the doorbell and pounding on the door at seven-fifteen. It is David Lanyon and two carbuncled henchmen, one with a bobble hat, one without.
‘Hi, I hope you don’t mind, I’ve brought Digger.’ He gestures towards the garden where a muscular black Labrador is aiming a jet of steaming urine at my green tulips. David is a shining example of health, optimism and clean laundry; he has on a washed-out red guernsey and jeans faded to the point that I always long for mine to reach. He chats to the boys, who are hanging around in the hall in their pyjamas. Giles and Felix bond with him instantly.
‘Mum, have you seen David’s trainers? They’re excellent. Can I have some?’ His helpers are less fragrant, and look like a couple of Scaven Dwarves from the boy’s Warhammer armies. I begin to feel utterly invaded as they tramp in and out with toothy saws, rolls of cable and sagging metal toolboxes. David’s car, an old Red Cross Land Rover with logo still intact, is reversed right up to the door to speed the unloading process. The postman arrives, and even though he only has one thin card reminding me of The Beauty’s vaccination dates and the door is wide open, he finds it necessary to ring the bell and express concern.
‘Hope nobody’s been badly hurt,’ he says, and I smile as disdainfully as I can with sheepskin slippers, bare legs and a helping of Ready Brek plastered over my shoulders.
‘Not yet, but that may change.’ My taut, brooding delivery is faultless, and he drives off very alarmed.
later
The bathroom is a cross between a potential Little Mermaid’s sea palace and Stig’s dump. Sticks of MDF and little piles of sawdust lie among the stacks of castellated wood and odd lengths of gleaming copper piping. Plastic tubes, sand, insulating foam and baskets of mottled shells fill every spare inch, and there is no way anyone will be able to use the room for at least a week.
The two Dwarf Warriors have gone, David is teaching Giles and Felix how to slow-bowl on the lawn and The Beauty is having her bath in the kitchen sink. This is huge fun. She puts a green flannel on her head and delivers her mad, squeaky laugh. As I lift her out, Digger trots past the window with a blur of feathers in his mouth. Wild rage surges. I scream, ‘You bloody bastard shithead dog.’ The Beauty’s face crumples and her mouth becomes a square of misery.
Am heading out to kill Digger when Giles runs in, breathless. ‘Don’t worry, Mum, it isn’t a hen, it’s a pheasant from the meadow, David just got it with Felix’s catapult. It was such a cool shot, I wish you’d seen it.’
I joggle The Beauty about and she begins to coo again, so sanity can now return. ‘How did you know what I was thinking?’
Giles giggles. ‘We could hear you swearing from the other side of the garden. You must have left The Beauty’s intercom outside. David said I should run and tell you before you burst a blood vessel.’
‘What a disgusting image.’ I turn crossly and flounce upstairs to give The Beauty her bottle. When I come down half an hour later, Giles and Felix are watching a video of Calamity Jane and David has gone. I settle down on the sofa in time to sing along with Doris Day to ‘Take Me Back to the Black Hills of Dakota’.
Dawn finds me crawling around in the garden with bits of wet grass on my face, having washed it in dew for increased possibility of great beauty. This is an economy drive, and virtue propels me about beneath the apple trees which are bowing and quivering in arctic winds. I could be paying large sums of money to a mail-order beauty company whose boast is that their products ‘give the complexion the glow of a country walk, the texture of a sun-drenched apricot’. I can’t wait to achieve this loveliness, and am convinced that nature can do as well as Agnés b in assisting me.
May Day is traditionally riven with ice storms and hailstones of record-breaking proportions and today is no different. I do not linger in the orchard, but dash inside to a mirror. A red nose and mud-strewn cheeks are the only sign that I have been involved in a beauty treatment, otherwise the usual pallor prevails. My skin looks nothing like a sun-drenched apricot: the economical rustic beauty treatment is wanting. But I did try. Virtuously, I write a plump cheque to Agnès b make-up and post it off. Within twenty-eight days I will achieve the longed-for apricot look with the assistance of Super Silk tinted moisturiser. Until then I shall avoid being seen in strong sunlight. Pretty easy, if this freakish and foul weather continues.
Terrible cabin fever this week, caused by the work in the bathroom. All day drills whine, saws rasp and hammers bang until I am forced out into the garden to escape. Have therefore achieved a lot of weeding and no work. Weeding is second only to hanging the washing out in my tally of chores that give job satisfaction. For me, the washing line is as good as any piece of contemporary art. Indeed, when married I could always irritate Charles a lot by telling friends of my plan to take a washing machine, a line, some pegs and a few days’ laundry down to Cork Street and set myself up as a one-woman show. I still think it’s a good idea, and often expand my thesis. A narrative statement could so easily be found in the separation of whites (innocence) and darks (death). The coloured wash can represent anything – sin, love, family life, fertility or joy; even a disaster such as colours running can be turned on its head so that all the grey vests symbolise politics or our cultural identity or something similar.
Whenever I start thinking about this again I am reminded what a brilliant idea it is. Promise myself that tomorrow I shall take photographs of my washing line and send them to Charles Saatchi. Increasingly, planning and fantasy are replacing any social life in the evenings. It is six months since Charles lived here, and even then he was only around at weekends because in the week he was in Cambridge at the head office of Heavenly Petting. I realise, with horror, that I am no longer civilised. Have not spent ordinary, companionable evenings with a husband or similar creature for years. I don’t know how to any more. Quickly telephone Rose to discover what she is doing now, it being mid-evening. Reassuringly, she is eating Twiglets and will be having cereal to follow. Tristan is apparently watching a programme about war and weaponry and has not said a word to her since he came home from work.
‘Have you had a row?’
‘Oh, no, he just doesn’t speak most of the time.’
‘Have you fed him?’
‘He made himself a foul-looking jam and peanut butter sandwich and then said he didn’t want any supper.’ She yawns. ‘I’m going to bed now, actually; Theo is getting more teeth so I’m bound to have a bad night with him. Let’s speak tomorrow when they’re all out of the way.’
It does not sound like much of an improvement on my evening. Immeasurably cheered, I ring off and get back to my plans for the laundry exhibition.
Heady, scented day makes chores impossible.
‘Let’s go for a picnic,’ says Giles. We arrange to meet my mother in the bluebell wood and become carried away with picnic fare. While I am dressing The Beauty, Giles makes forty-two egg sandwiches and Felix climbs onto the Aga to finish stirring the custard for the rhubarb fool. He then adds the rhubarb and pours the whole lot into a blue bowl and places it carefully at the bottom of the picnic basket.
‘You can’t take a china bowl,’ I shriek. ‘It weighs a ton and it’ll break if—’ I bite my tongue. Felix’s eyes are strained with tears.
‘You always make it in this bowl when we go to the bluebell wood. And Dad always used to carry it so it didn’t matter how heavy it was.’
I grit my teeth, recalling Charles’s vile and draconian discipline on picnics, when the boys were supposed to carry rugs and keep up with his ex-army speed-march through glades we should have dallied in. He carried the basket, so insisted that he could decide when we stopped, resulting last year in a picnic nowhere near bluebells but overlooking a gibbet. Felix, of course, has forgotten all this.
‘We’ll manage it,’ my best Brown Owl voice booms from somewhere, and we bustle on again, leaving the awful gap which I cannot fill for them behind us.
The scent of bluebells and wild garlic hits us as we approach the wood through a tunnel of cow parsley. Giles has run far ahead, but Felix saunters just in front of me, his hands lost in the froth of cream flowers. Rags is wild with excitement in the adjacent field, her ears appearing sporadically above speartips of young corn as she bounces in pursuit of rabbits.
Just as Felix starts to dawdle, we round a corner and walk into a scented sea of blue framed by beeches, their leaves neon green above soft silver trunks. We spread our rugs, and it is impossible not to crush a thousand flowers in doing so. The boys throw themselves down on their backs and stare up at the sky. The Beauty, released from the backpack she loathes, copies them, waving her feet in the air and catching her toes with her hands. I lie back and sigh, releasing all tension as taught by Alaric the yogic, and experience a moment of perfect calm.
‘Hi, chick, how’re you doing?’ My brother Desmond leaps from behind a tree and into my tranquillity, an urban troll with sideburns and a leather jacket. I groan, sit up and an explosion of hot breath erupts in my ear. Egor, my mother’s bull terrier, bounces through the bluebells followed by my mother, bearing three helium balloons with acid-bright Teletubbies on them, and a wine box.
‘What a perfect day. Hello, my darlings.’
‘Mum, why are you carrying those balloons?’
‘Well I brought them for The Beauty, and then I had a brilliant idea.’ She lights a cigarette and puffs triumphantly. ‘I realised that if I tied them to the wine box it wouldn’t be so heavy.’ She produces three plastic beakers from her pocket and struggles with the tap on the box for a moment. ‘And do you know, it really worked.’
Desmond stretches next to us and reaches for a beaker. He has a black eye, much to the delight of Giles and Felix, and the mauve and yellow bruising blends fetchingly with the bluebells.
I open my mouth to comment, but my mother hisses, ‘He’s too stupid and annoying to speak to. He’s been banned from the pub. He’s going back to London tomorrow and the band are playing on Tuesday evening, so he’s going to be teased quite enough then.’
Desmond is in a rock band called Hung Like Elvis, and is also a session musician, specialising in making recordings for commercials. This career suits him to a tee, enabling him to work infrequently for large sums of money which he can then spend in the pub and on his vinyl collection. He is also a rabid football fan, and is keen to brainwash Felix and Giles into his team’s support club. Today he has brought each of them an Arsenal item: for Giles a backpack, for Felix a hat.
‘Totally cool,’ shrieks Felix, unwrapping his hat from its polythene bag and chucking the rubbish on the ground.
Giles is a little more restrained. ‘Thanks, Desmond. Did you see the match on TV last night?’
While Desmond is occupied, I grill my mother further: ‘Were you there as well? What was the fight about?’ Notice that she is behaving uncharacteristically. She is pale, and has a straw hat jammed down over her eyes, but even so she winces in direct sunlight. She has left her wine untouched, slopping a crimson stream onto the bluebells, and is drinking Felix’s Lucozade in noisy gulps. Of course, she has a hangover.
‘No, but I was very stupid.’ She sighs and shakes her head. The Beauty, who can’t take her eyes off Granny, squeals and claps. ‘Very stupid,’ repeats my mother. ‘I stayed up far too late with the Foxtons. The Gnome brought them in and then went off to write a sonnet inspired by the stars or a comet he’s seen through a telescope on a mountain in Pakistan. I don’t know; anyway, he wasn’t there. And I soon discovered why he scuttled off.’ She pauses, sips her wine, shudders and begins to look normal again.
‘They want to make a sculpture and put it in the Wilderness, just outside The Gnome’s caravan. They want to do the skeleton of a giant pig. It sounds hideous, but I felt so sorry for them. Now I don’t though. It’s bad enough having The Gnome there without a dead pig arriving.’ She lights another cigarette, and stops looking quite so undead.
Desmond butts in: ‘She hasn’t been to bed. She stayed up with those oldsters quoting Latin all night. No wonder she looks rough.’
My mother coughs and groans colourfully, ‘No, no, I did go to bed, but it was light by then.’ She breaks off to shake her head sorrowfully at The Beauty, who is still rapt and gazing with her head on one side. ‘Poor Granny,’ says Mum with feeling, ‘poor old Granny.’ I pass her an egg sandwich and feel positively ancient and also depressed that none of this excites any emotion within me, save relief that I wasn’t there.
May 10th
Dusk has fallen. I am businesslike in yellow rubber gloves and the horrible red wellingtons, planting out the ranks of sweet peas I have grown. They are slightly depressing. I don’t understand why some are the picture of health, yet others look like heroin addicts, long, pale and trembling with yellowed extremities. I plant them alternately and hope that the healthy ones will improve their etiolated companions.
The Beauty retired hours ago and is sound asleep with her green-velvet kangaroo’s ear resting against her nose and her thumb in her mouth. This set-up was quite her own idea, and is instantly effective. As soon as the kangaroo ear touches her nose she is asleep, and if it strays in her sleep she reaches out to bring it closer. The downside of this form of baby hypnosis occurs if we go away and forget the kangaroo. It has only happened once, and would have been terrible had I not realised just as we were driving through Norwich. Another kangaroo, identical in every aspect save colour (the new one is blue with red triangles, the old one green and purple), was purchased and The Beauty did some delighted heavy breathing.
She is dreaming of bouncing around in the velvet pouch, but her brothers are less satisfactorily occupied. From my stooped toiling in the garden I can hear pauses and thuds as Felix makes a teddy-bear stepping-stone path around his room. Now and then cuddly toys leap from the window and Felix’s muffled voice follows: ‘Sorry, Mum, that was a dud. It didn’t work as a stone.’
From Giles’s window I hear what sounds like an elderly and lugubrious woodpecker at work, but is in fact Giles knocking in his cricket bat. Knocking-in and boxes are things I did not know about cricket. Man’s stuff which I would rather Charles had to deal with. Knocking-in is a mini Labour of Hercules, requiring you to thwack your bat with a cricket ball for a total of six hours. The idea is that this will stop the bat splintering to matchsticks when it first confronts a bad ball on the pitch. I can’t help wondering why the manufacturers don’t do this bit. I would happily pay extra for a mechanical Swedish masseuse to do the job, and it would be much more effective than the efforts of a small boy and his mother. In fact, it would be a perfect job for the poison dwarf, Helena. She could be hitched up with some paddles on her hands and tied to the factory conveyor belt. Must remember to suggest it as a nice little earner next time Charles comes for the boys.
The box, on the other hand, is nothing like a box but is the same as an oxygen mask except that it covers a different area.
‘It will be jockstraps next,’ I say to Giles with a stupid snigger, when I go to turn his light out. He sees nothing funny about jockstraps and looks at me severely.
‘I know, otherwise your willy flaps out from your shorts like a hose. That happened to Paul Bilton last week.’ Still not the flicker of a smile from Giles, and his blue eyes are fixed on my face so I am not allowed to either. Whatever happened to lavatorial humour? Such base thoughts are interrupted when I reach to close the curtains.
‘Giles, Felix, quick! Look! Deer. Rags is barking at them.’
Giles, Felix and I are in a line on Giles’s bedroom windowsill, hanging out of the opened top of the sash. Beyond the garden wall, a veil of green has crept across the field which was bare earth a few weeks ago. Enjoying tender ears of young corn by the mouthful are two red deer, one with antlers big enough to hang a coat on, the other delicate and almond-eyed like Bambi’s mother. Clockwork yapping from their feet reveals Rags’s presence, although she is invisible in the fading light. We all want to be nearer, and run downstairs and out through dew-soaked grass to the wall. The deer lift graceful necks and look across at us but do not move. Giles climbs over the wall and tiptoes to pick up Rags, who is dribbling with excitement and wriggles madly to escape. Still the deer stand, nibbling corn and blinking at us, as green leaves and grasses turn grey and ink, and birds swoop low as the darkening sky swallows the last pink drops of evening light.
May 13th
It is Wednesday. David the carpenter and Digger the dog reappear after a long weekend and both look sheepish. As they should. There is a Pompidou Centre arrangement in the bathroom, and the two henchmen have not been along to clear it up as David promised they would when he left on Friday to join a party of friends for a weekend in Bruges. Apparently he has been wined and dined by a handbag designer who owns a petit château. I am in sour-lemon mode and it sounds to me like a particularly shallow and silly feature in a glossy magazine. Cannot resist saying so.
‘But isn’t that the sort of thing you write?’ David asks blankly.
‘Certainly not. I write brochures for corporate entertainment.’ Hope to sound lofty, but fail. David ignores me and goes into the kitchen to put the kettle on. This is the final straw. Not only is he destroying my house, and spending glamorous weekends in the manner that I should like to be spending them, with people I am sure would be my friends if only I knew them, but now he’s helping himself to my kitchen. I huff about for several minutes, ostentatiously filling the dishwasher. David, a stranger to the placatory gesture, leans against the Aga watching me with narrowed eyes. Become sick of this oafish appraisal.
‘It’s rude to stare,’ I snap, wiping the table.
‘I wasn’t looking at you, I was thinking,’ he says absently, and is clearly still elsewhere in his thoughts. He starts to leave the room, but turns, hearing me slam saucepans into the sink.
‘You know, if you find this all too much, it might be better if we call a halt to it,’ he says. ‘It seems to wind you up having us here.’
Sensation of being winded, and overpowering desire for the new-look bathroom.
‘Oh, I don’t mind, really,’ I laugh, ‘it’s fine. I’m really excited about it.’ He pours coffee, rolls a cigarette and lights it.
‘Well, try not to let it get to you,’ he recommends, then adds, ‘Are you all right?’ I am fine. To me, the smell of coffee and new roll-up is heaven. I remind myself that I gave up evil toxins when my husband left. Have to leave the room to prevent myself snatching both items from David and consuming them. The Beauty wakes. She and I agree that Cromer is where we want to be and depart. As we head down the drive in a spin of gravel, I glance in the rear-view mirror. One of the Scaven henchmen is looking up at the bathroom window, from which David is lowering a sheet in the manner of a stork delivering a babygram, except that the baby is my loo. My banshee shriek upsets The Beauty and we have to listen to the garage hits on Vibe FM all the way to Cromer to cheer her up. She has acquired this taste from Giles, who makes the school run even more of a trip from hell than it has to be by forcing us all to share the sounds of vile local radio station Vibe FM. If I make a bid for Radio Four, he sighs and tuts like a bank manager all the way to school, except that his remarks would not pass muster in Barclays or Lloyds:
‘Oh, Mummy, sixty is so slow, we’ll never get there if you drive like this.’
This line alternates with, ‘When can we get a decent car?’
Giles’s joy knows no bounds this morning. We pause at the first junction on the way to school and Carmel and Byron Butterstone flash by in a mink-coloured slink-mobile.
‘Let’s see if we can keep up with them,’ I joke. ‘They always go at about a hundred miles an hour because they’re always late.’
‘That means we’re late,’ Giles points out. I catch a glimpse of Bronwyn Butterstone’s helmet of groomed and sprayed chestnut hair and the hint of a sage silk shirt and become consumed with rage – either road rage or wardrobe rage, I’m not sure which. Steeling myself until my knuckles are white, I grip the steering wheel and, hissing to myself, ‘I’m sure she’s had plastic surgery’, I put my foot down and we shoot off in pursuit, Giles a mound of giggling flesh next to me.
‘Mummy, you look so funny,’ he gasps in pauses, and then explodes again. A mile on I conclude that the winsome Bronwyn Butterstone can audition for Brands Hatch; I, however, cannot.
‘Mum, I feel sick,’ croaks Felix in the back, while The Beauty crows and shrieks with pleasure at this new, improved version of her favourite amusement ride, The School Run. A nicely positioned tractor prevents ignominy, and we follow the Butterstones into school nose-to-tail. Very pleasing, except that when Byron and Carmel get out of their car they are unaccompanied by sweet wrappers, crisp packets and Rags the terrier.
Felix and Giles stuff litter into my hands and aim covert kicks at the dog. ‘Just go, Mum,’ hisses Giles when I reach to embrace him.
Arrive home to what looks like a Council of War on the Scaven Warrior front. My mother, the henchmen and David are sitting in a circle in the garden on various bits of my bathroom, drinking mugs of tea and swapping roll-ups for straights. My mother’s specs have broken, and one arm is rising straight up from her head. She looks as if she is chief Mekon for the day and also Scaven High Priestess, due to the flowing nature of her coat, which has no sleeves, just ragged holes.
Digger and Egor the bull terrier sniff one another but the wrong message is transmitted. Egor mounts Digger, and my mother can’t control her mirth and snorts tea out of her nostrils. Rags rushes to join in and a dogfight explodes as our neighbour, a Christian, approaches up the drive. I have identified her as a Christian by the fish logo on the back of her car; it is the same as the one on Felix’s godfather Gawain’s car. Gawain is not a Christian, he got it under false pretences by sending off to the Christian Union to fool the police into thinking he was a godly teetotaller.
The Scaven Warriors jump about kicking the ball of tumbling dog, while my mother and I clutch our sides and can’t stop laughing. Have noticed that this seems to be a genetic failing in crisis, and Giles has it too, and probably The Beauty, who is clapping and cackling on the doorstep. She stops, though, spouting instant tears and yelling, when the Christian squats down in front of her and holds out a friendly hand. The Beauty recoils and raises her shoulder, shrugging off the proffered hand. The dogfight subsides, thanks to David’s well-placed blow with a length of overflow pipe, and birdsong erupts, loud and implausible, around us. The Christian coughs and speaks.
‘I wonder if you could come and get your duck? She’s had ten ducklings and they are all over my vegetable patch.’
Am sick of animals and their fecundity. I wish Simon would come and cull them all. My mother breaks off her conversation with David, in which they have been saying vile things about Rags.
‘How lovely to have ducklings, would you like to give them to me?’ The perfect solution, as my pond has dried up and is just a muddy pit. I agree at once.
‘What a brilliant idea, and you can help me catch them.’
Armed with a red candlewick dressing gown unearthed in the barn, we set off with The Beauty to catch ducklings. My mother hobbles in an embarrassing fashion, having broken the heel off one of her shoes in the dogfight. The ducklings are milling about in a bed of euphorbias and look as though they are clockwork as they whirr along behind the duck.
‘We’ll head them into this run, then you can throw that thing over them,’ says the Christian. It sounds foolproof and simple. It is a fiasco. The mother duck flies straight out of the run and then zooms up and down quacking at her trapped children who keep appearing out of the sleeves and around the edges of the flung dressing gown. Moments later the euphorbias are quivering again, with anxious duck noises emerging. Suddenly the mother duck breaks cover and, head held high, quacking encouragement, she leads her fluffy string past us, through the hedge and out into the water-meadow.
‘They’re going to the stream. I doubt if many of them will survive to return with her this evening,’ says the Christian in a voice of doom, and she looks at me as though it is my fault. My mother also looks at me reproachfully.
‘We’ll try again tomorrow, then.’ I try to keep good cheer uppermost in my voice until we are out of hearing. ‘Why did you look at me like that? I couldn’t help it.’
My mother shakes her head. ‘Far too hasty in your approach – it’s always been your trouble.’
I decide to let this deeply provocative remark go, and ask instead, ‘So what do you think of the bathroom?’
‘Oh, they didn’t show me; we were talking about sculpture. David seems to have a much better idea than that pig thing for my Wilderness. He wants to make a bacchantine temple.’ She bends to smell a branch of apple blossom at the bottom of the drive. ‘How lovely spring is,’ she muses.
I take deep breaths to prevent the sour-lemon words within me from coming out. I succeed. Instead of saying, ‘Typical, trust him to see what you’re made of,’ I say, ‘That sounds splendid.’
‘Anyway, I’ve asked him to come and have a drink tomorrow evening so he can see the garden. You can come if you like.’
‘How kind,’ I smile, and my mother gives me a sharp look.
‘It’ll do you good to get out without your children. When is That Man having them, anyway?’
‘He’s coming with the poison dwarf to fetch the boys on Saturday. They’re taking them to Centre Pares for the night.’
My mother snorts. ‘God, how pukesome. Still, a weekend off. I’ll have The Beauty, you can go to London and have fun, or do whatever you like.’ She sees me trying to think of an excuse and raises a hand. ‘It can be payment for the ducklings if you ever catch them. And think of the bliss of escaping from this junkyard of bath stuff.’
Life is a bed of rose oil and I am blissed out after aromatherapy, and only a third of the way through my weekend at heavenly health farm. My friend Rose is joining me this evening for a couple of lettuce leaves and a celery stick, and I have not a care in the world. Even Rags is taken care of; David is house-sitting for me and will get on with drawing up the plans for the plumbing system, which presently resembles the Minotaur’s labyrinth sans string and Ariadne. But anyway, I just don’t care.
Everyone here wears sorbet-coloured tracksuits, and some sportier folk even have tinted sun visors. I can see three oldsters, backs curved like commas, arms bent into marathon-runner mode, trotting in a little line around the gracious and groomed gardens as I write. One in mint, one in peach and one in plum. Musing as to why the particularly nasty palette of colours for shell suits are always given edible names, I photograph the line as they stagger past. Proof, should anyone require it, that it’s not all sybaritism here. No, no, no.
Am feeling so on top of the world, I can’t keep still. Book myself into a cranial osteopathy session, remembering the beatific effect this invisible treatment had on The Beauty when she was born. Charles and my mother had been withering in their condemnation of alternative therapies, and when I summoned the cranial osteopath, Charles left for two days. He said it was as a protest; I now realise it was to go and frolic about with pygmy Helena.
Anyway, Yvette arrived, a true exponent of hippy culture with batik T-shirt, more or less see-through, droopy tits (of course) and yellowed toenails. I was determined not to be put off by her appearance, but Felix, who had popped his head round the door, vanished downstairs yelling to my mother, ‘Quick, Granny, there’s a witch in Mummy’s room and she’s putting a spell on the baby.’
By the time my mother had bustled up, huffing fury at me and Yvette, the treatment was over. The Beauty, who had been yelling, was languid and sleeping, and has scarcely cried since, unless in protest at perceived poor treatment. Even my mother admits that there was something in Yvette’s magic. All she did was rest The Beauty’s tiny head in her hands. Truly cosmic; I can’t wait for it to happen to me.
May 18th
Nature has gone wild during my two days away, and this morning I saw three wild orchids among the many primroses on the roadside, a joyful gathering of flag irises in a meadow and also a jay. It was dead, unfortunately, but I was nonetheless delighted to see it and add it to my bird count. So far I have heard more than I’ve seen, including cuckoos, woodpeckers and assorted owls. Since cranial osteopathy I am convinced that my senses have improved, and I am now much like the six-million-dollar man except in muscle power. It is as if I have been put through a car wash and had all the detritus scraped off everything. Even breathing has become a joy, with spring scents mingling and hitting me in the lungs. I am becoming a nose. I mean this in the perfume sense, not physically, thank God, although Giles told me the other day: ‘You’d be really pretty if your nose wasn’t so big, Mum.’
This morning’s olfactory experience includes a hint of grass cutting, a suggestion of apple blossom, a waft of cow from the field and, best of all, an overriding scent of wet paint. David is finally at the decorating stage with my bathroom. With my new improved eyesight I can tell that I do not like the colour he is using, and despite his insistence to the contrary, I know it is not the one I chose. I wanted Plover’s Egg, and I think he has used Dead Mouse. He insists there is no such colour as Dead Mouse; I am sure there is, though. These colours prove their smartness by having eccentric, call-a-spade-a-spade names. There is String, Ox Blood, Cold Cream White and the enigmatic Dirt, but I wish they would be a little bolder and have Phlegm and Fungal Brown as well. And I would especially like to be able to get hold of Eyeball White for the bathroom ceiling, which needs a blue-white tone to lift it a bit.
May 20th
Felix and Giles return. Charles rings the bell, and I open the door to one former husband, smirking slightly, and two piles of merchandising. ‘The way to a boy’s heart is via the shopping mall,’ I quip.
Charles jangles his keys. ‘We had some time on our hands yesterday after the boys did well with an early reveille and run.’ He allows himself a flash of a smile as I gape in astonishment at this insight into quality time with Dad.
Giles and Felix are not listening, but are burrowing in their shopping bags. Charles coughs self-effacingly and continues.
‘They said they hadn’t any clothes, or trainers, and from what you sent with them it seemed true.’ A needle of resentment jabs at me. ‘Don’t criticise my packing,’ I hiss, a line so babyish I wish to bite off my tongue. The boys push past into the house and there is Charles’s car with the crown of Helena’s head just visible in the passenger seat. I turn to him in reproachful surprise.
‘Oh, Charles, you should have bought her a little cushion while you were shopping.’
He hardly pauses, but swipes right back as he marches to the car. ‘I’ll be in touch about next month: I thought I’d take the boys to Wimbledon, I’ve got tickets for centre court.’ Fifteen, Love to Charles. I slam the front door cursing, and am almost sent flying by huge, hugging boys.
May 26th
Thrilling sense of freedom caused by sitting on the train to London reading Hello! and being surrounded by other ladies, many of them quite antique, with packets of sandwiches and sensible shoes which say that they, like me, are on their way to the Chelsea Flower Show.
I, however, do not have sensible shoes. By the time I have negotiated the tube as far as Sloane Square and lost half an hour in a delicious ribbon shop, I have two blisters and a throbbing big toe. Trailing an exquisite bundle of pink and yellow satin, which I plan to sew round the edge of a cardigan in the manner of top fashion houses this season, I head for the nearest shoe shop and arrange myself for purchase. Very shaming moment when I remove the silly slingbacks I had thought appropriate when dressing this morning, and find aroma of Emmental clinging to my feet. Rub them on the shoe shop carpet and move to a different squeaking leatherette chair. How does anyone buy summer shoes? Summer feet are clammy and puffy and have red areas and also grass stains on their soles. They are hideous. They do nothing for the flimsy, strappy shoes so fashionable this year. Regretfully, I opt for a pair of clumpy mulish sandals as worn by biology teachers. These will get me through the flower show in comfort, I tell myself, and turn resolutely away from the shocking-pink kitten heels which beckon and tempt from the shop window.
By the time I have crossed the King’s Road I am in agony, and at the entrance to the flower show I am forced to remove the new instruments of torture and go barefoot. I now have seven blisters bubbling on my feet. With savage pleasure I hurl the nerdy cripplers in a bin and hurry into the floral vortex of Chelsea. So glad I paid for them with Charles’s money out of the children’s account, so have not just wasted £80 of my own. Surely I can now go back for the kitten heels, as I still have no shoes? This uplifting thought carries me barefoot into the throng of well-behaved frocks and hairdos and little notebooks with neat notes.
Two hours later I am sagging beneath piles of catalogues, and the inside covers of Devil’s Cub, my Georgette Heyer of the moment, are dense with illegibly scrawled names of flowers and cryptic notes. On the train going home, assisted by a gin and tonic, I decipher ‘Heterosexual Lord Bute trailing clouds of perfume’, and give up. Maybe ‘heterosexual’ is ‘heliotrope’, or ‘hemero-callis’. Or maybe it’s a colour code. I don’t know, and what’s more, I just don’t care. For on my feet beneath the Formica table lurks a pair of perfect pink kitten heels. Even the blisters don’t hurt any more.